HOLIDAYS IN AV
Av features two holidays, Tisha B’av (the 9nth of Av) and Tu B’av, the 15th of the month. These are radically different holidays.
Tisha B’av is a holiday of national mourning. It seems to have originated after the destruction of the second temple (Mishnah Taanit is the earliest quoted source for the holiday). It marks the destruction of both the first and second temples, the crushing of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE and the last vestiges of Jewish political independence until the creation of the state of Israel. Over the centuries, we’ve added other horrible things that have happened to us as a people, including the start of the first crusade, expulsions from England, France and Spain. It is a catch all for acknowledging and grieving our ancestral trauma.
How do we mourn all of our losses? Traditionally we do this by fasting, abstaining from bathing, sex and anything pleasurable (it’s actually forbidden to study Torah on Tisha B’av as this is a joyful activity—unless you are in Hebrew School). We read Lamentations. In summer camps we would have some kind of grief ritual and above all I remember the haunting melody of Ani Maamin. A song about how we believe in the coming of the Messiah despite everything. There’s a wonderful midrash about the Messiah being born on Tisha B’av (Jerusalem Talmud Berachot 2:4)
I absolutely believe that this is a place where we can be creative and should perform Jewish informed grief rituals. We have much to grieve in our world. Ancestral trauma, the destruction of the ecosystems on which we depend, the horrible ways humans treat each other, our own individual experiences of loss and pain. We should all be crying on Tisha B’av. If you are like me these days, I’m finding it hard to access the grief I know is there. I could use a good grief ritual.
Tu B’av is a joyous, minor and mostly unobserved Jewish festival that occurs a mere six days after Tisha B’av during the full moon. It’s sometimes called the Jewish Valentine’s day, but that seems to me to be trivializing it.. The holiday is first mentioned in the book of Judges (21:19) and is a festival that served to integrate the tribe of Benjamin into the rest of the 12 tribes (there was historically some tension between Benjamin and the other tribes). The Benjamite young men would get wives from unmarried young women of other tribes. All the eligible young women would wear borrowed white dresses (so that no one could tell rich from poor) and would go out and dance in the vineyards (Taanit 4:8). The new couples would then go and live amongst the Benjamites, since ancient Israel was patrifocal. The Mishnah says “Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel said: There were no days as joyous for the Jewish people as the fifteenth of Av.”
Tu B’av calls to my mind (and maybe it is only me) the intermingling of Israelites and Midianites and/or the Moabites at Ba’al Peor (Numbers 25). This also had a definite sexual aspect along with the idea of marrying outside the tribe. I wonder if Tu B’av is a way of kind of regulating wild sexual energy while giving it some needed expression.
I think observation of Tu B’av should focus on sensual activities, whatever that means for you. I think doing some kind of outdoor dancing with people dressing in white seems a fairly obvious adaptation. Tu B’av is a chance for us to honor the joy of our bodies, squeezed between the three weeks of mourning preceding it, and then the time of repentance during Elul (a half month away) and then judgment in the next month of Tishrei, the month of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot.
